Free The Saturday Wife by Naomi Ragen Page B

jewelers.
    And then there were the outcasts, the great unwashed, the children of cousins whom one simply cannot uninvite; who always show up at family celebrations in lesser or greater numbers, dressed in jeans and sneakers and uncombed hair or low-cut dresses with sequins missing; who look like they have just gotten up from the couch after watching a Sunday movie and who never seem to feel underdressed or out of place or even aware of the chagrin and pain their insulting carelessness is causing their hosts. They are the people everyone does their best to pretend aren’t there at all, particularly those who invited them.
    Toward the back, away from the band, in the best seating area, sat the small cluster of Gentiles: the black woman in a sleeveless Donna Karan dress, looking fabulous; the long-haired programmers; the short red-haired accountant. They smiled with discomfort at one another and the people around them, wide-eyed in the fashion of tourists to Indian reservations, who are anxious to observe the folkways of the natives with stalwart respect.
    Teeming hordes of children, looking well-combed and uncomfortable in their shiny, stiff shoes and elaborate outfits, chased one another around the hall, stealing cakes and nuts off plates like locusts, tugging at their parents’ legs. The little boys ran wild in white shirts and manly ties, while the little girls wore either miniature versions of whorish fad fashions or old-fashioned picture-book dresses that made them look like dolls.
    Up and back they ran, holding sloshing glasses of Coca-Cola, which they refilled at an alarming rate, pushing aside the older men, who waited patiently and diffidently to ask for their glass of scotch and a glass of semidry white wine or rum Coke for their wives. The women would drink half a glass and put it down, already feeling themselves growing dizzy and drowsy from the unaccustomed experiment with alcohol that didn’t consist of one sip from a communal wineglass Friday night.
    There was mixed seating—that is, men and women, husbands and wives and children, all seated at the same tables. But there was also a smallsection in the rear with a mechitzah, so that the more distinguished rabbis wouldn’t be forced to sit with their wives. The rebbitzins sat together with their marriageable daughters, all wishing to make a public display of adherence to the most pious stringencies in Jewish law, stringencies invented by the fortunate men who sat all day in study halls and thus had all the time in the world to rescue God from His horrible mistakes in neglecting to include such laws in His Torah and Talmud.
    The men’s tables included the elderly rabbis and their sons and grandsons, and even some of the more farchnyokt friends of the groom, who looked over the elderly scholars the way some men ogle single girls, savoring the possibilities. The thrill of talking to the great Rabbi So-and-so! How they would astonish their friends (and perhaps some unlucky prospective bride on some far-off shidduch date) with this tale. How they had brought up some intricate point of law and how the great Rabbi So-and-so had cocked his head and nodded approval as he listened, spellbound, to an explication. Imagine!
    Religious men are the worst name-droppers. They will spend half a date regaling you with their exploits in cornering some octogenarian who is—or one day might be—a member of the Council of Sages, whose photos or garish oil portraits appear on posters in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Geulah, and Bnei Brak like rock stars.
    But if a man isn’t interested in women before he has a wife, in all likelihood he is bound to be even less interested once he gets one. So any single guy at a wedding who prefers to sit next to bearded sages is not, generally speaking, a good marital prospect.
    You see them sometimes, walking four paces in front of their wives and children in parks and zoos during the Intermediate Days of Festivals like Succoth and Passover,